10.45pm: Baby flips over onto side and almost headbutts self against cot bars. Breathing become slow, deep and even. Wonder briefly if baby is concussed. Decide on balance of probabilities he isn’t. Cross fingers.

10.48pm: Slowly stand up from chair. Listen to heart beating like the clappers with The Fear that baby will wake.

10.50pm: Creep from room stealth like, ninja style, without making a sound.

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I’ve not quite hit that yet. We’re still at the stage that he falls asleep in arms, buggy or not at all 😦 Going to sleep in his cot (and more recently STAYING asleep in his cot) is a magical far away land…

I used to love when he was a newborn and he’d go to sleep in his buggy after being rocked and I could just transfer him to his Moses basket. Now he’s too hulking for that, so it’s just into the cot. And we wait. And some nights like tonight, we wait and wait!

Ah jaysus! Ours was like this – baby #1 goes to sleep at 7pm. Baby #2 goes to sleep at 7pm. Revel in smugness until rather loud sister-in-law visits and wakes baby #1, who wants to crawl, no, be picked up, no, crawl, no, PICK ME UP, laughs like a dirty old man, finally yawns a t 9:45pm, remember that actually have third child so tell him to get off PSP and go to bed, then sneak into room where baby #2 is sleeping and try to rock baby #1 to sleep while he attempts to claw my eyes out, pull my lips off, and shove finger up my nose, he sleeps, count to 20, put him down, he immediately sits up and wails, hold breath and rock again, repeat until 10:45 while staring at baby #2 willing him to stay asleep, then creep out of room trying to avoid squeaky floorboards, get half way up hall when your Brian Blessed of a husband coughs like someone on 40 major a day and repeat rocking until you nearly nod off and spend next hour feeling guilty about potentially dropping baby on floor.

Yep. I remember that fun time. DS is now seven. He pretends to be asleep then scares the bejesus out of us by suddenly asking a random question like “what’s for dinner”. Never fails to freak me out. It does get easier. Eventually you just leave them to play on their own. Just don’t forget to lock the bathroom door. Kids seem to have a thing for cleaning the toilet.

Such a funny post… Well, maybe not so much for you. My youngest is 8 weeks so most of the time she will nod off in my arms. I’ve been trying to work in this self soothe thing and put her down still awake but drowsy. That seems to be just about the time the dog starts dream in and sounds like it’s been slaughtered. Through gritted teeth my dog I’m spitting obscenities at the dog. Just as she stops, my husband gets on the phone to someone abroad and thinks just because they are in a different country he has to shout at the top of his voice so they can hear him. If that doesn’t wake her I’m usually ok, because of course I’ve mastered every floor board to the door. One step left, 2 steps forward and shimmy sideways !!

This is hilarious, Karen! It used to take three hours of rocking some nights to get India to sleep, and she’d be awake again 45 minutes later. How people did it without smartphones I do not know. Thankfully, at the moment she goes to bed at 7pm and sleeps through the night about 70% of the time *touches all the wood*

Touches all the wood for you too! The thing I’m most grateful about is that it can take a good while to get Seán to sleep when he’s going through a phase like this (though thankfully the phases don’t last too long) is that once he’s asleep he stays asleep! SO I am very very grateful for that!

Oh yes, that not going to sleep thing put me into a whole load of ridiculous bedtime routines! We lived in a flat with very thin walls, and families weren’t really encouraged. So I could never bring myself to let him cry for long and always stayed with him until he was asleep. I think there was about nine months of the not going to sleep thing. I used to try to bore him to sleep – in a really monotonous voice I would reel a place name for every letter of the alphabet, or anything else I could think of. Eventually I settled on an animal alphabet thing which I did for seven years! As he got older, I was able to leave him to settle by getting into more and more elaborate Bedtime Routines. Obviously we did bedtime reading; and there was the our favourite three things today; and pick a number, count to that, then I’m going (less fun when he could count to 50 and beyond). I also made the “mistake” of getting in beside him while doing all this. But frankly, that was the best bit of my day. I loved being snuggled up to him. Sometimes I was so tired, I fell asleep beside him. But all this bedtime stuff was worth it, he’s always gone to bed when asked. As he’s grown older, he reads in bed. It’s imprinted on his brain that no matter how many hours you spend on XBox, bedtime is reading only. At weekends sometimes I’m going to bed while he’s still reading at 1am!